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Tuesday, 17 April 2012

White Heat vs Our Friends in the North

The
Anachronism Extravaganza

“It’s a big ask,” Alan says of his friends’ plan to
get heroin addict Jack clean in the penultimate episode of ‘White Heat’, the BBC
2’s 21st Century rendition of ‘Our Friends in the North’, so epically broadcast
in the 1990s.

Turns out it was. Both for the characters struggling
to get the obnoxious Jack out of his habit and for the producers of White Heat
themselves. In 1982, no one ever uttered the phrase “a big ask”. I know, I was
there, unfortunately. If you had said that to someone then they’d have misheard
and thought you were talking about someone’s backside.

The anachronisms that abounded in White Heat have
been the source of some frustration and light-hearted commentary but
by-and-large critics have shrugged and let them go. It’s the drama that counts,
they have said. This is possibly because the series was so limp in comparison
to Our Friends in the North. And most critics making contrasts concerning the
two series have been so too.

The 1990s’ programme had the characters develop
organically over the decades from the area in which each had grown up in,
whereas White Heat’s concept was contrived from the off. Its whole approach was
a nod to the politically-correct, a phenomenon originally designed to challenge
oppression but has since become the most insidious cause of our pathetically
dumb culture there is.

There’s the upper crust revolutionary-cum-viscount,
a middle class feminist, a Lancashire wanna-be artist, a Geordie computer geek
ahead of his time (a sign White Heat was self-consciously anachronistic), an
Asian-Brummie gay medical student, a northern Irish Catholic and a Jamaican
over in the UK studying law.

“A social experiment”, Alan, the computer guy, calls
the gathering of the students in the flat in the first episode. And one utterly
divorced from the realities that are supposedly flailing at them from all
sides, in 1965, 1967, 1973, 1979, 1982 and 1990. Not to mention 2012.

Whatever the year covered in White Heat, with all
its varying fashion and hairstyle changes, the camera veers its way towards a
constant presence. The real star of White Heat is the goggle box, as 70s icon
Harold Steptoe once called it. Or, in other words, the television set.

It’s entirely appropriate in one sense for TV to
take centre stage in a drama that transcends the period when television began
to dominate cultural life in Britain, as a source of light entertainment, as
well as a source of news. However, at a time when Britain chuckled itself
hoarse to the likes of Steptoe and Son, the Likely Lads and Porridge, White
heat ignores these completely and TV in all its glory then is lost on the
series, even though the set is on constantly, because it’s the only reminder of
the year we are in most of the time.

Our Friends in the North charts the lives of four
people from Newcastle from the mid-60s to the mid-90s. They are all white and
working class and have known one another from childhood, more or less. The
intensity of their emotions towards one another is instinctively believable as
a result. This is not something we can say with White Heat.

And that’s not all, in Our Friends in the North the
characters do actually engage in the historical events that inform the
episodes, whether it’s political corruption in Newcastle, the dealings between
the Met and porn barons in London and the battles between the police and miners
during the strike of 1984-5.

The 1990s series does actually address the
longer-term events better, such as the crippling building projects in the north
east and the travails of the met’s ‘dirty squad’ down south, than it does its
treatment of the miners’ strike, which is disappointingly contrived. But White
Heat doesn’t even approach this level of success.

The 1982 episode was particularly bad and
inconsistent. Lots of coverage of the Falklands War blaring away from a
television screen, not unusually, but aside from Charlotte (now seemingly a TV
editor) barking orders for underlings to follow, the only direct engagement
with the event was of her ‘disturbed’ mother bantering on about it. Then, the
only reference to Greenham Common was of the woman getting lost in it. It was a
poor return on a series that began with an elevated view of itself as a
feminist alternative to Our Friends in the North, where the main characters
were men.

The denouement appears to vindicate the programme,
however, in sanctifying Orla, the Irish Catholic woman, who we learn was the one
who kept the rest going all the years.

That’s when the pigeon-holing, politically correct
aspect of White Heat comes severely unstuck. The fat, northern Irish Catholic
of the group of friends becomes the martyr. The middle/upper class remnants
remain alive and happy. It’s a complacently duplicitous scenario, particularly
as what happens with Charlotte and Victor at the end is almost a replica of
that between Nicky and Mary in the final scenes of Our Friends in the North.

More profound is Geordie’s (played by Daniel Craig)
walking across the Tyne Bridge with Oasis’ ‘Look Back in Anger’ playing.
There’s no sentimental hugging there. More’s the pity, you might say. If one
character needed a hug, out of them all in both series, it was certainly
Geordie.